It looks like Active State perl behaves ...

It's not down to AS perl. The redirection is done by the shell processor that is invoked by qx/backticks or system. Under AS perl that shell is the standard win32 cmd.exe.

Other variants, such as cygwin builds and Strawberry etc. may choose to invoke a different shell. I think cygwin (as standard) uses a sh-alike, but you can probably get csh, bash or zsh that would run under cygwin. (If you must:), but you might have to configure something somewhere to get them used by default, and each has its own set of advantages and restrictions as with the *nix brethren.

In theory, there is nothing to stop you from configuring a cygwin build to use cmd.exe, but I've no idea how.